Alternatives

You've already got a bunch of EOS lenses?
You're not a pro who pumps through hundreds
of images a day? Then you want a 20D, or a 350D,
or maybe a 300D if you're strapped for cash.

If you're reading this long enough after
I wrote it that 5Ds are easy to buy, and you've
got the cash to get one, then go ahead and buy
that instead; it seems
unlikely you'll be disappointed by it.

If you're skint, feel free to look for a
good used D60 or 10D for cheap if you like,
but you probably won't find one.

Thus far, the choices are not too hard.

People who don't already have a significant
investment in one kind of camera system, though,
face a pretty confusing collection of options
these days, even if they're sure they want a
DSLR. And a lot of people who buy DSLRs would
actually be happier with something else, just
as a lot of people who bought 35mm SLRs probably
shouldn't have.

People who're used to little consumer cameras
invariably think a DSLR feels like a brick by
comparison, and they're right.

With a lens of quite modest dimensions on
it, a 20D will easily weigh more than a kilogram.
An
EOS-1Ds (a big pro cam, used by real professionals
and the
pathologicallywealthy),
wearing far from the heaviest lens you can put
on it (Behold!
Tremble!) will be well over two kilos. Three
kilos is easy to hit. That's about the same
as fifteen little consumer cameras.

This is the kind of weight that
medium
format photographers are used to. Most people
don't want to get used to it. Bear this
in mind.

And, of course, any digital camera
is going to be outdated alarmingly quickly,
some people's
strange opinions notwithstanding.

It'll probably work for a long time,
unless you buy a
total
piece
of
crap or suffer a
misadventure, but wait a few years and you'll
be able to get the same specs for far less money,
guaranteed.

Given all this, it's hardly surprising that
a lot of people just throw up their hands and
buy any old thing, and I don't blame them; that's
certainly my policy for the purchase of
beverages.

I want to do my part to reduce the number
of people who don't have any fun taking pictures,
though, so here's the quick and dirty guide
to What You Might Like To Buy Instead Of A 20D.

First, simplest, cheapest option:
No camera.

Cameras are dangerous things. They suck you
in. Some people get sucked in very badly indeed,
to the point that they obsess over taking pictures
of things rather than actually experiencing
those things for themselves.

If you travel the world with your camera
stuck to your face, you may well end up with
scarcely more connection to your experiences
than you would have had if you'd just stayed
home and looked at other people's photos of
the places to which you'd otherwise have gone.
You could buy some really nice coffee table
photo
books for the price of a world tour and
a funky photo rig.

If photography has more minuses than plusses
for you, don't do it. Sure, you may want
or need a photo of something now and then, but
a disposable film camera or borrowed digicam
will do that job, and not leave you feeling
bad because you spent $2000 on a bunch of gear
that you don't even like using.

He was taking picture after picture of the
Sisters, as the sun went down and the light
changed. Nothing wrong with that. He was also
using autofocus for every shot, despite the
fact that neither he nor the Sisters was moving.
There's nothing seriously wrong with that,
either, but it does make you look a bit of a
tit.

He said, and his wife long-sufferingly confirmed,
that he owned more than one
L series lens. He opined that he pitied
Nikon users, because all Nikon lenses were miserably
soft.

I smiled indulgently.

He, clearly, was not actually miserable.
But I'll bet you ten bucks that he would have
been happier if he had none of that camera crap,
and more money in the bank. So would his wife.
There wasn't a damn thing about the pictures
he was taking that was any better than what
his wife's pocket camera (well, OK, large
pocket camera) could do. He could have been
just standing in the breeze enjoying the
serenity.

People like him can be found in all walks
of life - I dare say he's spent a lot less than
most of the people who
tweak
their cars to make them
slower. He may, however, have spent more
than many people with a kitchen full of
Damascus and
laminated
steel knives that hold an edge better than
any other blades in the world, on account of
the fact that they're never used to cut anything.

Retailers make these people very welcome.
They may be tiresome to talk to, but they sure
do prop up the bottom line.

Second option: A nice little consumer
point-and-shoot digital camera.

If your motto is "always
bring your camera", you'll find it a lot
easier if your camera genuinely does fit in
a pocket, and there are lots of good options
even at the cheap end of the consumer market,
these days.

Never mind the megapixels. Despite what the
colourful stickers on the cameras want to make
you believe, they hardly matter at all for consumer
cameras; they don't even cost you lots of extra
money for storage, now that Flash memory cards
of all kinds are cheap enough that any schmuck
can keep a few 2Gb cards handy.

In this category what you actually
want is a great
user interface first (because many of these
cameras are very small, even auto-everything
operation can be harder than you might think;
don't get an ultra-mini fashion-accessory camera
unless you've got unusually
nimble fingers), a good price second, and
a decent lens third (zoom range being about
as important as low chromatic aberration and
geometric distortion).

Modern consumer digitals still aren't magic.
They won't tell you not to take flash photos
of
fireworks or alert you if you're taking
a picture in which a palm tree appears to be
growing out of Uncle Larry's head. But, for
less than 1% of the average Western wage (including
the decent-sized memory card and rechargeable
batteries that the bloody camera companies
still don't put in the box), you can
get a camera which really does do everything
most people need, and which also fits only somewhat
uncomfortably in a pocket.

There are about a million products in this
market segment, of course, but as a starting
point you might like to weigh up the Panasonic
DMC-LZ2 (currently about $US250 ex delivery),
or a Nikon
Coolpix 4800 ($US350).

Or, as far down into the bargain basement
as it's wise to go, a Canon
PowerShot A510 or Sony
DSC-S40. They're
both
selling for around the $AU285 mark from
local dealers here in Australia at the moment,
and you won't pay a whole lot more for rechargeable
AAs, charger and memory card.

Third option: A "prosumer" integrated-lens
camera, the fancier versions of which are sometimes
known as Fixed Lens Reflex cameras, or FLRs.

There are scads of options here, and the
category's no longer very tightly defined; you
can pay as much for a prosumer camera as for
a basic DSLR with lens, but you definitely don't
have to. The Olympus
C-8080 Wide Zoom, for instance, can do everything
that most people do with a pro camera, but costs
considerably less than the cheapest DSLR body
(the older
C-7070 Wide Zoom's
under $AU665 locally).

You're not quite stuck with the standard
lenses on these cameras, either; most prosumer
cameras have threads on the end of their lens
that let you screw on telephoto (which can be
a tad
cumbersome),
close-up
or
wide angle adapters. The adapters are often
pretty optically decent, for the money.

Special mention should go to the veritable
hordes of cameras with 10X zoom lenses
and image stabilisers (so you can actually use
their 300mm-or-more-equivalent zoom without
a tripod). That sort of thing used to be
highly remarkable and
leave you either with questionable optics or
a camera the size of a trench mortar, but now
you can get things like Konica Minolta's magnificently
UFO-ish
DiMAGE Z5 for
under $AU720 locally, or Sony's
Cyber-Shot DSC-H1 for not much more. Nikon's
slightly more normal-looking
Coolpix 8800 is fancier, and goes for
$AU1690 locally (or $US850 or so in the
States).

Fourth option: Some other DSLR. Some
other big names have come up with their own
Unique Selling Points in the somewhat-affordable-DSLR
market, upon which they like to expound at great
length.

Canon's advantages
can be summed up as "low noise, EF lens compatibility",
and the 5D's going to sell like blazes to people
who've never been able to afford a full frame
DSLR before (I'm guessing 15% of buyers), pros
who want another body to go with their bigger
full-frame Canons (maybe another 10%), and
aimless enthusiasts (the rest).

Nikon's recently released 6MP
D50 is cheap ($US800,
$AU1430 with a lens), also has excellent
noise performance, has a big LCD screen and,
of course, works with
Nikon lenses, which have remarkable forward
and backward compatibility. New Nikon lenses
work on old cameras, old lenses work on new
cameras. If you've got a bunch of nice Nikkor
glass, you obviously don't want a Canon DSLR.

Pentax's 6MP
*ist DS (the name could be worse, but they'd
have to
work at it) is similarly inexpensive (only
about $AU975 with a lens!), is small and
light (for a DSLR), and also has good
noise performance, a big screen, and 0.63X
viewfinder magnification - only an eighth
better than the 20D, but still worth having.
And it takes Pentax K mount lenses.

The 6MP, $US1200 Konica Minolta
Maxxum 7D has, wait for it, a Minolta A-type
lens mount, so... you know the rest. The Maxxum
mount standard has been around since 1985; there
are plenty of them kicking around out there.

And the 7D's quite small, and it's got a
great big LCD. But it, like various other current
Konica Minoltas, also has the best Unique Selling
Point out there right now - an optical
image stabiliser built into the body,
not the lens.

So every lens on a 7D has image stabilisation.

The only down side is that because the stabiliser
moves the sensor, behind the mirror that
bounces the image up to the viewfinder, you
can't see it in action. If you want to see that
fun "oily" look as you jiggle the lens, you'll
have to buy some stabilised binoculars and look
through those.

That aside, the integrated stabiliser a big
deal, and has resulted in the 7D (and not-quite-on-sale-yet
5D; way to keep the names un-confusing, guys)
getting
love from the
curmudgeons who've
resisted the charms of previous DSLRs. OK,
it's only six megapixels, but a sharp stabilised
6MP image beats the heck out of a blurred unstabilised
12MP one.

Further diverging from the if-you-own-these-lenses-you-should-buy-this-camera
theme is Olympus'
Four Thirds System, named for its consumer-cam-type
4:3 image aspect ratio.

Four Thirds hardware can be made by
any number of lens and camera manufacturers,
but so far it's is pretty much an Olympus-only
show, with only the 4.9MP $US1000
E-1 and newer 8MP only-$US800-with-a-decent-lens
E-300 "EVOLT" DSLRs to choose from (and,
some time soon, the
E-500, giving enthusiasts yet another chance
to play the waiting list game). Both of them
have Olympus' magic dust-rejecting vibrating
sensor, though.

Four Thirds defines smaller-than-35mm-sensor
DSLRs and lenses to match, so that everything
can be smaller and lighter and cheaper than
hardware with full-frame compatibility. On the
downside, it's incompatible with everything
else in the world. If you've got no lens collection
at the moment, though, that doesn't much matter,
and there's a decent
range of Four Thirds lenses out there now.
You still only have approximately one choice
for any particular job, but when that choice
is a good one, who cares?

(And yes, you can put
silly lenses on Four Thirds cameras with
adapters.)

The E-300's a particularly attractive option
for anyone who's only got a nice-prosumer-camera
amount of money to spend at the moment.

And the 6MP, $US3000 (bear with me here)
Epson R-D1, which is also for weirdoes,
and not actually a DSLR, but which is still
a much more defensible purchase than the Sigma.

The R-D1 takes standard all-manual
Leica
lenses (no autofocus, no auto aperture,
no girlymen allowed; even ancient screw-mount
lenses can be used with an adapter), and it
behaves surprisingly like a classic Leica rangefinder
camera, right down to requiring you to rack
a "film advance" lever to "cock" it for the
next photo. Which, if you ask me, is exactly
as stupid as consumer cameras that play a tinny
"motor wind" sound when you take a picture.

The R-D1 is expensive for what it is (a less
silly alternative for people who just want the
cool rangefinder style is the integrated-lens
Leica
Digilux 2, sold cheaper as the Panasonic
Lumix DMC-LC1), but nothing else lets you
use a lens that's 72 years older than your camera.
Or a really good
lens that's 29 years older than your camera.

If you buy any kind of interchangeable-lens
digital camera, though, remember that it is
incumbent upon you to learn how to use it.

I'm rather stern about this.

If you're a regular subject-always-in-the-middle-of-the-frame,
direct-flash, I-don't-know-why-my-photos-are-so-often-blurry
happy snap photographer, buying a DSLR is a
brilliant step on the way to becoming a good
photographer - or, at least, one decent enough
that your happy-snapping relatives reckon you're
a genius.